Our colleagues at FAVS News have begun a six-part series called “Building Bridges.” The guiding principle is that including people and groups of all faiths and backgrounds is essential to building strong communities. The series is funded by Humanities Washington.
The first installment is about international students in the Inland Northwest who are navigating their new homes in turbulent times. The writer is Lake Lust.
Lake Lust: Moving from anywhere abroad into the United States is already such a shift, but moving to Eastern Washington specifically comes with its own cultural attributes, right? Like this is a very like Christian heavy area. There's a really high degree of religious participation in Eastern Washington and if you were raised abroad in like a traditional Hindu environment, traditional Muslim environment, and you're expecting to come to like a very multicultural place like America, it might have a different impression.
So that was kind of my thoughts when I was first starting this story and designing questions and figuring out who to reach out to. And when I set out to report, I was basically looking at any international student leaders on campuses in the area to see like what their experience with religious participation is. Like how are you interacting with American Christianity? How is this shaped like your traditional beliefs? How is your religious participation change and why? And basically, what is your campus experience like in regards to faith?
DN: And once you approached them, were they eager to talk?
LL: Yeah, I think because the people I were talking to, they are leaders in their community anyways. Obviously they're already very passionate and very used to discussing these types of issues.
So I had very, very long, very interesting conversations with everyone, which, you know, is my favorite thing to do as a journalist. It's to speak with someone who's just completely stoked about my story. That makes it easier to have a long conversation.
And yeah, these folks have had such interesting religious journeys. I talked to one source who was raised in a traditional Hindu environment and then became skeptical about his faith, identified as an atheist for a while, became skeptical about that, and then converted to Christianity. And so just kind of hearing how living in the United States and going to university influenced that journey was really interesting. So yeah, very, very interesting people.
DN: As I recall, you went to Whitworth and you went to Eastern, a secular school and a Christian school. Did you find differences, similarities between the folks who were going to those two schools?
LL: Yeah. So interestingly enough, all the international students I spoke with had kind of a similar things to say regarding the difference between international student culture and domestic student culture, namely that the experience of international students is pretty similar because they tend to stick together. You know, they have separate orientations for international versus domestic students.
They have international advisors that they go to. They have sometimes the same dorm building, the same club spaces. They do a lot of bonding within the international student group.
And sometimes there are incidents or maybe it's less accessible to like fully integrate, if you will, with the domestic students on campus.
DN: So did they find themselves uncomfortable here in some cases or do they feel like they get along OK?
LL: Kind of both. I mean, there are always incidents. There was an incident that one source mentioned that I discussed in my article where they just had to witness a preacher on the EWU campus saying some pretty Islamophobic rhetoric. And this is from someone who has a lot of Muslim friends through their international community. And so hearing that can kind of be disturbing.
You hear a lot of like microaggressions from people who are not necessarily being racist or anything, but just have never meaningfully interacted with people from other countries because they've been born and raised in this area. And so they just say things that are maybe a little ignorant and not mean spirited, per se. And then another theme that everyone told me is that that's just kind of all part of the exchange student experience in particular, where you come here to learn about another culture.
And even when it's uncomfortable, you are definitely still learning, learning how to witness stuff like that, learning how to react to it, learning how to assert yourself. And so that I thought that was pretty cool.
DN: So these people then are conduits to folks from their past lives, their past cultures. Do they talk about whether they would recommend folks come to the United States to experience this or are they trying to warn people away from it?
LL: You know, I didn't specifically ask whether they would recommend the experience to others, but everyone I spoke with definitely did not regret coming here. Obviously, it's a little tenuous right now, the status of immigrants and visas in this country. It can be a little scary or just, you know, uncertain. So maybe now is like not a not a great time. Like we're seeing international student enrollment dropping. So I'm sure that's a factor in a lot of people's minds.
But as far as the folks who have been here who already did it, who went through four years of college in the United States, I definitely found that they said that they gained a lot from it.
DN: So we as reporters, when we do a story, we learn ourselves about certain things. What did you learn from this story?
LL: That's a great question. I learned that people are so much more open to change than I previously realized, just hearing about and people are more open to being multi-faith than I previously realized. I talked to a lot of folks who don't necessarily identify with one religion or another, but who will go to mosques and churches and synagogues just because they enjoy the experience of interacting with many cultures. I thought that was inspirational and just a really great way to learn about the world and maybe that's like a practice I would feel inspired to do myself. Visit different faith institutions and just see what I can learn from other people's cultures, too.
